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October 2nd, 2007
10:03 am - AmberCon NorthWest 2007 Game Book open
So the AmberCon NorthWest events are open for registration now. Registration is due by this Saturday (October 6).
ACNW 2007 Game Book
I'm running two games this time: a parlor larp and a pulp game set in Amber. My general rule for most conventions is to run one fairly traditional game, and one more experimental/indie game. At previous AmberCon NW years, I had run an Amber DRPG game ("Princesses in Rebma") and a session of Polaris. This time, I'm doing something a little different.
Hamlet
This is a parlor larp created by the original designers from Shifting Forest Storyworks. The description I gave is: A larp adaptation by J Li of Shakespeare's Hamlet, set in a twist of the plot the day after Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius. Hamlet is about to be sent away to England in a few hours, and will not have another chance to kill Claudius perhaps for years. The majority of the court, Ophelia included, have been told that Polonius accidentally fell down the stairs. At the queen's insistence a small gathering is held to send Hamlet off. In the middle of it all, Laertes returns unexpectedly, demanding to see his father.
I've run this before and it's a pretty good scenario, I think. The court and politics make it similar to Amber in theme, I think, and the material is familiar to most people.
Big Trouble in Little Amber
This is a pulp game set in the Amber universe, obviously taken from John Carpenter's hilarious Big Trouble in Little China. The description I gave is: In Jidrash, the capital of Kashfa, there is a neighborhood known to locals as "Little Amber". It is a little piece of the great empire of Amber, where people of Amber congregate within this foreign land. However, mysterious events go on within the bowels of this neighborhood that none of the Kashfans fathom. Solemn oaths are sworn, deals brokers, and wars carried out without any of the local Kashfans understanding.
All of that is about to explode when a local tradesman happens on a mysterious crime, and heroes within Little Amber must rescue the kidnapped victims.
This is a Spirit of the Century game set in Kashfa before the first Amber series, with pulp action and spirit.
My plan is that all of the PCs will get detailed background information about plots that are going on -- though there will be a mix. All, that is, except one. One of the PCs will be the "Jack" character who is a native Kashfan that doesn't know anything but is nonetheless caught in the middle of it. I'd like players to contact me ahead of time with character requests, and I'll send background.
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December 29th, 2006
10:39 pm - Amber: The End of Doubt
So our Amber Diceless campaign, "Shadow of a Doubt", wrapped up just before Christmas. I haven't posted about it on my LJ since my Amber Campaign Update in July. However, it had been going along swimmingly. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) zdashamber was terrific as a GM, and it was a good run.
Liz posted a summary of the campaign and its conclusion in a post on the Feminist SF blog, Roleplaying in Amber -- though it is in part about Zelazny and the reinterpretation in general for the RPG rather than about our particular campaign. There's also various stuff about the campaign on the RPGnet Campaign Wiki.
So, in the end, we lost -- though none of our enemies particularly won either. Brand destroyed the Pattern, but was killed by his daughter Alexandra (Cynthia's PC), who went out in a blaze of glory. Chaos was assaulted. To me, the interesting part of the campaign was about the loyalties. Our PCs were not the stereotype of Amberites scheming for ourselves, because we had loyalties to different modern ideologies. We did eventually compromise and come together, setting up a constitutional monarchy rather than totalitarian rule. However, our original vision of a reformed Amber was destroyed along with Amber itself.
To me, what was more than that was the images of everything. The most powerful thing about fantasy is that it has such a rich set of symbols. Alexandra's death was great -- she had grabbed a hold of her father Brand, and went with him when he teleported away. To forestall her killing him, he had teleported to high in the air. But after an exchange during which he kept teleporting upwards to keep falling, she stabbed him in the heart and then died from the fall. Cap that with us describing the statues in her honor, and Hector envying her heroic death. Madeline suggested that she could survive, but Cynthia was totally right to insist that she die.
I should comment on one of the big deals for me. So my PC, Manfred Flaschbart, was a flamingly gay turncoat Nazi officer. In the backstory he was a double-agent between the Nazis and the English resistance -- and during the game, he was a double-agent between Chaos and Amber. My mid-campaign twist with him was his demon form. In the series, shapeshifters have a demon form -- and for him I chose a female succubus-like form, which I first described to the GM in a secret email as "Bat-winged Bimbo from Hell" (a reference to Greg Porter's Macho Women With Guns).
The funny thing was that we had played out in public a number of scenes where he went into his demon form. However, none of the other PCs saw him and so the demon form had never been described for the other players. Manfred himself then described it to the others as a "hideous demon form" -- in keeping with his somewhat jokingly misogynist gayness. So two sessions later, when the other PCs finally saw it and the players asked me to describe it, I came out with it. There was much wincing at his/my describing a buxom female form as "all part of being a hideous demon". I worried a bit like I had gone too far with that, but I hope they forgave me.
Part of his other background was that he had a personal Shadow (i.e. dimension) which was inhabited by people who could slowly change their form. By the write-up, changing eye color can be done in a day; changing sex takes two months or so; while changing height may take a year or more depending on the degree of change. So the society (named "Glamaria") had a populace all with idealized bodies, and the culture was a take-off of thirties Hollywood.
Anyway, all of this adds up to a terrific campaign. I bow down before Madeline's coolness as GM, and all the other players' coolness, too.
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November 10th, 2006
08:23 am - New Edition of Amber?
I almost forgot... A big splash at ACNW06 was reported first by zdashamber on RPGnet, as "Amber 2nd Edition - a new hope!" -- namely that Edwin Voskamp and Eric Todd announced that they had bought the rights to publish Amber roleplaying stuff from Wujcik, and they intended to put out a second edition.
This is intriguing. Personally, I disliked the original Amber Diceless book. There are many good things about it, but the bad things stuck out sorely to me -- in particular having the players play the much weaker children of the elder Amberites, but also many broken things in the attributes and Sorcery. My first campaign of the ADRPG pretty much confirmed the things I disliked about it. However, I have had a lot of fun playing in some Amber games since then. There are a few notable differences: Many of the ACNW games had the players running the elder Amberites or their equals, for example.
I'm sure there has been discussion of 2nd edition Amber DRPG from the period when it was being considered by Guardians of Order, but I'm not sure where to find it. The new GOO Fan Forums have an Amber Diceless RPG Forum, but it's mostly empty at present. Any pointers to suggestions or attempts at this? From the links on my Amber Page, I see a lot of people have diverged house rules. I'm not sure I see particular commonalities, though.
Basically, I think one needs to start with a certain re-envisioning of what the background is supposed to be, to fix issues with the attributes and sorcery. So I would start be a careful study of the Amberites and Chaosites and their powers in the books. Describe them, and then re-envision the system around that.
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November 9th, 2006
11:49 am - Back from ACNW
So, I'm back from AmberCon NorthWest and had an excellent time. Only down side was that I got sick and skipped out on a Hero Quest game to save my voice for the next day. I enjoyed all the games I played in. However, the standout would have to be "Karm v. Osric" -- a 16-player larp organized by Lydia Leong, Yi-Mei Chng, Julian Morley, and Robert Donoghue.
The two games I ran went very well. "Princesses in Rebma" had a bunch of excellent interplay between all the players. The most prominent was the interplay between Deborah Donoghue as Queen Moire (as a scheming manipulator) versus Robert Donoghue as a very loud, brash Prince Corwin. I'll ponder about adding some to it for next time.
Polaris went well again. One of the things which we noted was that when playing the Heart, people still got really into doing nasty things to their Protagonists. It even a bit upped from each side. So, for example, Lee had set up that his male knight was secretly in love with another man -- an old rival of his named Keid. In the first scene which he started, it was made clear that his mother was trying to set him up with a woman. I upped this a bit later, as the woman he was set up with, Aquila, burst into tears, explaining that she was secretly engaged to Keid. He comes back that he finds that Aquila is the only woman he ever loved. Lee had some further comments on his LJ (losrpg) as "Reflections on Polaris".
I'm putting together a full convention report to post.
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November 1st, 2006
02:02 pm - Off to AmberCon NorthWest
Tomorrow morning I'm leaving for AmberCon NorthWest. I realize I hadn't posted about my schedule for it, so I'll give a brief outline:
- Princesses in Rebma (GM John Kim)
- Exponential (GM Eric Todd)
- Amber's Home for Imaginary Friends (GM Jennifer Zimmerman)
- Amber Shadows -- Continuation (GM Lee Short)
- Karm v. Osric (GMs Lydia Leong, Yi-Mei Chng, Julian Morley, Robert Donoghue)
- AmberQuest (GMs Lee Short)
- Polaris (Organizer John Kim)
Short Descriptions:
( Read more... )
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July 17th, 2006
04:47 pm - Amber Campaign Update
So I should put up a note about the Amber Diceless campaign which I've been playing in. I've put up a bunch of campaign notes and material on my site, plus there's stuff on an RPGnet wiki section and a rules document on the GM Madeline's site. It's all linked now from my general Amber Diceless page:
John's Amber Diceless Page
I'm playing Manfred Flachsbart -- a German officer, secretly a homosexual, who has become an agent for the English resistance. I went easy on the other attributes then pushed for first in Warfare during the auction. He comes across as an easy-going fop prone to wicked innuendo, but privately he is strikingly skilled at warfare.
Manfred was inspired most directly by Donna Barr's "Pfirsich Marie Rommel" The Desert Peach (pictured above right). Pfirsich is the fictional flamingly gay brother of Erwin Rommel. I originally thought of giving my PC the name Pfirsich, then later decided that it was just an occaisional nickname. Donna's Pfirsich is quite funny in playing up Nazi sex fetishes, but also has some treatment of more serious issues.
As I read more on it, though, I also was intrigued by the history of Ernst Röhm -- the co-founder of the Nazi co-founder of the Nazi Sturmabteilung, also known as the SA or "storm troopers". Rö (pictured below right) was a homosexual, even openly so for several years (from 1925 until his execution in 1933). He also pressed for a genuinely socialist agenda -- the nationalization of large firms, profit sharing for employees, and cuts in the interest rates. He was an accomplished military man, but the SA were considered by the traditional military to be a brawling mob of undisciplined street fighters.
After the second play session, the PC's have just been introduced out from their Earthly war into the more cosmic war that is going on in the multiverse. This is set in the middle of the first series of Amber novels, early in the Patternfall War. It'll be interesting to see, I think, how we drift from the plots of the books. The backdrop of WWII creates a very different feel from Zelazny's books, and certainly different attitudes on the part of the PCs.
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June 14th, 2006
05:18 pm - Three New Campaigns
So I'm starting on three new campaigns at once: Amber with my former Buffy group (GMed by zdashamber), Call of Cthulhu with my former HârnMaster group (GMed by myself), and Dogs in the Vineyard with my former HERO System group (GMed by myself).
The former two are long-standing play groups. The last are a group of guys who contacted me from my GURPS player-finder listing in March. I played when one of them ran a Gamma World adventure ("Famine in Far-Go") using the HERO System, which was silly fun but bogged down after a while. The GM seemed to feel so as well, so yesterday we took a break and I started them on DITV. This group are all completely unaware of indie games or RPG theory -- they've been pretty narrowly GURPS players. Everyone took very well to Dogs, and we made characters and got about halfway through a town in the first session. I went with Judd's "New Gidea" which Carl Rigney had run for me at End Games April Mini-Con.
The former HârnMaster group wanted a change of pace and we collectively agreed to try something else as a change of pace. Four of us have been playing for years, but over the past few months we added players Daniel (last October) and ewilen (in February). For the next campaign, we've been talking about doing Burning Wheel, but neither I nor Jim felt up to GMing it yet -- too much work. Someone else suggested Call of Cthulhu, which I agreed to GM using a bunch of prepared material I had. I took a vote on which of 1890s, 1920s, or modern (using Delta Green) that we wanted. It was a close vote, with most people split over preferring 1920s or modern. I went with the least controversial, which was 1890s. This was the setting of Pagan Publishing's sourcebook The Golden Dawn as well as a former campaign (The Ripper Game), so I had a ton of material. I went with using the Golden Dawn as a center, and will be adapting adventure material from the sourcebook. This weekend, we made characters and started on a brief introductory adventure.
Our long-standing Buffy campaign had its series finale in late April. We had a brief break and then had a session to jointly create our series and characters this weekend. As you might guess from her handle, zdashamber is an Amber diceless fan. She also introduced me to AmberCon NorthWest which I tried out last November. Unfortunately, druidsquirrel bowed out of Amber game. However, we added vito_excalibur. We held off any email debate, and instead came to the first session to brainstorm in person what the campaign should be. We went around a few times, but then eventually came up with one we were all happy with. We start in a Shadow similar to Earth, but in 1946 of an alternate history where the Nazis conquered England due to American hold-off and also rumored help from mystic artifacts. Our characters are all members of the resistance in England and unknowing Amberites (perhaps arranged to be together by some elder).
Not a whole lot in common here -- except that, as I've noted, I'm playing more by-the-book than I have in earlier years as part of my heightened interest in game design.
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February 9th, 2006
10:11 pm - Why does the Amber crowd like diceless play?
A particular question that I'd like to answer here is adamdray's question in comments to his post "System Does Matter". He originally wondered, "How cool would the Amber DRPG be if it didn't rely so much on trust? How much fun would the Amber community have if they had a set of rules that supported them better?" After I described my AmberCon NorthWest experiences, he asked: "What do you think it is that the Amber crowd likes about Diceless play?"
Before answering, though, I want a brief roundup of recent talk on immersion, which may be tangentially related. ewilen has his post on "Situations and Stories" suggests that immersive-leaning players take up a combination of "PC proactivity" and "PC magnetism" rather than Forge-style "protagonism". eyebeams has his post on "Food is the first thing. Morals follow on!" looking at immersion versus narrativism in light of Stanislavski and Brecht. Lastly, Jonas Barkå collects together a bunch of RPGnet thread links in "Immersion on RPGnet".
But to answer Adam's question:
I think the key draw of Amber Diceless as a system is that it has a much larger fraction of direct fictional description. That is, most words spoken at the table are descriptive language about what is happening within the game-world. There's still a lot of false starts, take-backs, and meta discussion, but less so than most other tabletop games. There is often a lot of misunderstanding about the idea of "system taking back seat" or being "transparent". The system (in the sense of way of doing things) is still an important influence on play. Usually this means there are not a lot of words spoken about the mechanics at the table.
Why would anyone want that? Well, in principle I think that it makes for a more richly described fiction, which some people prefer aesthetically. I note that the same thing is true of Olle Jonsson's Jeep-style freeforms and Scandanavian larp. In the extreme, there are some games where everything done is 100% in character (though there is a briefing and debriefing). This greatly limits what can happen in the game, but within those confines what happens is very richly described.
Other games often admit more metagame talk at the table, which affects the descriptive bits but does not directly describe anything in the fiction. I was just listening to Matt Snyder's Nine Worlds actual play on the drive home, for example. For a faster read, though, you could also take a look at lordsmerf's sample of Capes over IRC. Note that the product of game-play is the whole text, including both IC and OOC. Since this was over IRC, that is the entire game. Unlike most forms like theater, literature, or film, a lot of what is happening doesn't directly describe fictional events.
On the Forge, play is often described as the process of negotiating statements into the Shared Imagined Space. However, some techniques handle negotiation with a minimum of time, words, and effort. In particular, I think that ownership is a key concept. Ownership streamlines the process of negotiation. If I have ownership of something, that means that I know clearly what I can say and be assured that it will be accepted into the fiction. Ownership doesn't have to be absolute -- there can be exception cases. However, the more often the exception cases, the more time is eaten up.
I've been meaning to get back to my incomplete Game Chef design entry -- Morpho Londinium. One of the key concepts of that game is that abilities are always 100% reliable. If I use my Persuasion, I will always persuade you. However, there is the possibility that I will lose the ability after I use it. I was thinking of this as another way to streamline negotiation.
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December 17th, 2005
06:20 pm - Authority and Authorship
I had a post a little while ago about standard rants I was considering. I noted Matt Snyder's two recent posts on referring to Amber play: A trumper and Prince of Chaos Theory. Now, I don't disagree in principle with most of what he said, but the slant of many comments prompted this.
Authority is not the same as authorship.
A referee can have authority in a sports game or other contest. This means that he can make judgements of the players and has final say over whether a goal counted, whether a player is allowed on the field, and so forth. This is not the same thing as authorship. i.e. A referee does not author the action of the game. The players have defined means to input, and that input is the center of the game. Now, it is certainly possible for a referee to control the game, by constantly ruling against one side and never the other. But that isn't the norm.
The same principle applies to role-playing games. By giving the GM authority, it is possible for her to shut out input from the other players -- but the result can also be a game with equal input or even dominated by the players.
For example, I ran an Amber Diceless game at AmberCon NorthWest, entitled Princesses in Rebma. As GM, I resolved all actions through fiat. However, the players had strong authorial input. There was no fixed plot for them to go through, and their decisions among themselves were central to the plot. I have played and game-mastered games where this was even more true -- such as the Night Fever larp at Knutepunkt 2005. There everyone created their own characters and there were no NPCs. The organizers had the authority to step in at any point, but they never did that I saw. Instead everything that happened was determined by the players.
Yet somehow, many people seem to inexplicably confuse authority with authorship -- such as saying that an Amber game must inherently involve listening to a story being narrated to you by the GM. This is pretty demonstrably false.
The resolution mechanics are only a small part of authorship. I had a lesson in this particularly at the "Amber's Watchdogs" game at AmberCon NorthWest -- which used a variant of the DitV resolution mechanic but almost nothing else from that game. As Pôl notes in an thread on ACNW 2005, the results were nothing like a canonical Dogs game.
With just the Dogs resolution mechanic, the GM can arbitrarily set the difficulty of a conflict in many ways. Mostly critically, the GM can narrate in more NPCs to help with a conflict and thus get arbitrarily more d6's. They can also (1) add in blank traits and relationships; (2) judge what PC traits can get added in; and (3) choose amount of escalation. In short, if a Dogs GM wants to beat the PCs, she can. Even if they win a conflict, the GM can potentially improvise new background to eclipse the result -- such as saying that the NPC they just overcome was actually working for a greater sinner.
There are many things which empower the players in Dogs. The most critical aspect is the background which places the PCs as the authoritative judges over the townspeople. There is also the town creation rules -- i.e. the sequence of Pride, etc. -- and the pseudo-NPC method which restricts characters. If followed faithfully, this strictly limits how much the GM can set up a town to be a linear plot.
Now, there are some games which genuinely limit GM authorship mechanically. For example, games like Ben Lehman's Polaris or Lee Short's Sun, Moon, Cross don't have a singular GM -- so obviously that control goes away. But many other games still give effective authority over resolution to the GM, but still allow for partly or primarily player-authored games.
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November 29th, 2005
01:19 pm - More on Informality and ACNW
I'd like to clear some air about the previous post -- which had some good discussion in comments, but also generated rancor. First of all, I should clear up some things. It is always difficult to compare experiences. People of differing opinions often have differing experiences. Here I'd like to discuss about the larger cultural context of gaming.
I should give some context to my AmberCon NorthWest visit. I am not a fan of Zelazny's Amber novels -- nor am I a fan of Wujcik's Amber Diceless RPG. I had played in one Amber DRPG campaign in 1992, and I basically hated it. The campaign I played essentially reproduced all of the bad features I noted in the book: NPCs who vastly overpower the PCs, competition between PCs without the option of fair contests, and Sorcery broken. I had read the first Amber series shortly prior, and I liked it enough to finish it but was not especially thrilled. However, over the last year, I had heard good things from two people (first my gaming friend Madeline, then online correspondant Lee) about AmberCon NorthWest, so I decided to try it out. In part, I specifically wanted to see what the alternate culture was like.
Mark W wrote:
I haven't been to an Ambercon. I have, however, been to similar single-fandom microcons, both in and out of RPG-land.
The biggest things these events have in common is that often no-one even knows they exist unless they have already penetrated the outer layers of an insular fan culture ... There is a sort of "reverse network effect" that discourages recruitment in these kinds of mediafan communities, and I see no reason why this would be any different for gaming. I would be curious, though, to know how many of those newcomers become regular attendees - my guess is that there is a non-negligible attrition rate among people who find that the reality does not mesh with their expectations, but I doubt there's any straightforward way to know for sure. This doesn't sound like my experience of ACNW -- but I'd welcome more comparisons to the communities which you met with. ACNW was something of a close-knit community, but it seemed to be that way through a direct network effect. That is, people who came would tend to come back bringing their friends and family. I'm not sure how many people were there -- I would guess between 100 and 150 (though some only stayed part time). Since I was only there one year, I couldn't say about the attrition rate. Perhaps Lee could say more.
As for demographics -- naturally most people were from the Northwest or Northern California. There were a number of people from England, though. Compared to mainstream gaming conventions, I saw relatively more couples and families attending. In registration, the organizers made an important point that all games should be classified as "teen friendly" or not -- something I rarely see in mainstream games. I also think that the percentage of women was greater -- I'd guess maybe 40% compared to maybe 15-20% at my local gaming conventions like ConQuest and DundraCon. What was even more notable was that there were many more games GMed by women: 30 by men, 20 by women, and 12 by both. That's much more than I've seen in either mainstream game conventions or surveys of gamers, where female GMs are generally less than 10%.
People tended to hang out together a lot outside of the games -- though this was influenced by the venue, which fairly isolated (i.e. there were only really two places to eat). Most games were Amber Diceless or a variant, but there was also Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures, and Polaris.
As a side comment, I think there is a pretty major cultural difference between film, television, and comic fans and literary fans. I don't know much about the former -- but this felt very different than my encounters with TV or comics fans. I felt similarly from my visit to WisCon, a literary science fiction convention.
Mark W wrote:
I think that the "cultural" approach to functional play clearly provides things that formal design can't. I just don't think those things have much of anything to do with the actual experience of play, at least not in any reliable way. I think the big benefit is as a filter against agenda clashes (technical, creative, whatever) - people are strongly trained in a Right Way To Play, and those who don't find that fun either adapt or fall by the wayside. Pretty soon, the community is homogenous enough in terms of preferences that it rarely experiences overt dysfunction. Well, I'd offhand agree that the larger context of play is probably more important for the informal approach. I'm not convinced that it requires a larger total investment in training, though. I had no problem jumping into play at either ACNW or Knutepunkt. It may require more in the way of selection -- but that would have to allow self-selection or selective recruitment, since I didn't see much "weeding out" during the cons.
I think that each side examining the other might well help. For example, I think that games based on formal design can still benefit from the cultural context of play. At the same time, an informal environment like ACNW can still benefit from formal design. Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures, Polaris, and Star, Moon & Cross all made an appearance there. I think Polaris and Star, Moon & Cross both worked pretty well with the crowd there.
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November 26th, 2005
09:59 am - Formality and Informality
So I just got back from AmberCon NorthWest, which was a lot of fun as I suspected. This was a small but well-organized game convention -- the closest equivalent to something like Knutepunkt that I've seen in the U.S. I am working on a full convention report, but the short form is that I tried out several games of Amber DRPG, plus Primetime Adventures, Lee Short's tarot system Star, Moon, and Cross, and a Dogs in the Vineyard variant. I also ran two games: Ben Lehman's Polaris and a straight Amber DRPG game entitled "Princesses in Rebma". I was impressed particularly with Polaris, but my straight Amber game also went very well.
While pondering the results during my Thanksgiving vacation, I took notice of Chris Chinn's post, Say Yes or Roll the Dice -- where he argues that every important point in the game should be within formal mechanics. Ben Lehman says something similar in a recent Forge thread, A Plea for Gamism, These sorts of well-structured rules are not only necessary for Gamist play, but are in fact necessary for any satisfying play that entails creative collaboration (i.e. not strictly GM fiat and also not based on slavish mutual devotion to a pre-existing canon of texts.) In short, almost all even vaguely satisfying play is not merely benefitted by clear, well structured rules, it actually requires them. On the face of it, I find this odd to say the least -- but I often have differing perspective. From my point of view, I rarely strictly follow formal rules for my other creative or social activities. So why should RPGs be any different?
That said, I do generally prefer strong formal rules in a game. However, I have had some excellent times playing games without strong formal rules -- most recently at AmberCon and Knutepunkt earlier this year. One could say that such freeform games have "well-structured rules" which are informally understood -- but that weakens the above statements to the trivial. I feel that informal understandings are not the equivalent to formal rules. They have different strengths and weaknesses. I'm not sure quite how to express those, though.
Often, I feel the opposite to Chris' idea. Commonly formalities are there not for their own importance, but rather to speed along those things which are not important. For example, formal introductions are there to smooth over the initial part of meeting to move on to more interesting informal social interactions. Within RPGs, many mechanics serve the function of smoothing or speeding along play rather than being intrinsically interesting in themselves.
Personally, I also tend to prefer formal dice-using rules, at least in tabletop games. However, I also dislike it if there is too much excitement specifically over a die roll. I prefer it if the important moments -- the greatest player tension and interest -- hang on what someone will say next. Role-played dialogue and choices, in particular, are things I enjoy as important moments.
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October 19th, 2005
08:55 pm - AmberCon NorthWest Results
OK, so I've gotten my results for AmberCon NorthWest 2005. I was pointed to this originally by zdashamber and then later found out losrpg was also going. It looks really cool. What I like is getting into contact with a wider variety of game styles.
So I did pretty well as far as my picks. Unfortunately, I didn't get into one of Eric Todd's games, which losrpg recommended highly. However, I'm not disappointed. Seems like I'm getting a mix of semi-traditional Amber-ish stuff as well as several more Forge-ish games. Likewise, I'm running Polaris as well as an Amber DRPG game. Below I list my original picks marked up with what I actually got.
( Read more... )
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